What are the Alberta Badlands?

The Alberta Badlands are the eroded river valley landscape of southeastern Alberta, formed where the Red Deer, Bow, and Oldman Rivers and their tributaries have cut deeply through the soft Cretaceous sedimentary rock of the Western Interior Seaway. The badlands cover about 6,000 square kilometres and are the largest badlands in Canada, with characteristic features including coulees (river valleys), hoodoos (eroded sandstone pillars), buttes, and extensive exposures of fossil-bearing layers.

The Alberta Badlands are world-famous for late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils. Dinosaur Provincial Park, located along the Red Deer River about 220 kilometres southeast of Calgary, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 for its concentration of vertebrate fossils. More than 50 species of dinosaurs have been found in the park, dating from the late Campanian stage (about 76 to 75 million years ago). Notable finds include the world's most complete tyrannosaur specimen Gorgosaurus libratus, multiple specimens of the horned dinosaurs Centrosaurus and Styracosaurus, and the duck-billed dinosaurs Lambeosaurus and Corythosaurus.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, opened in 1985 and named after Joseph Burr Tyrrell (who found the first Albertosaurus skull near Drumheller in 1884), is one of the largest dinosaur museums in the world. The museum holds more than 160,000 fossil specimens and displays about 800 in public exhibits. The museum is operated by the Government of Alberta and has trained or hosted thousands of palaeontologists since opening. The Hoodoos south of Drumheller, the Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site at East Coulee (the last operating coal mine in the Drumheller area until 1979), and the Last Chance Saloon at Wayne are popular tourist sites in the badlands.

The Alberta Badlands also include the Milk River Badlands and Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park (Aisinai'pi National Historic Site, designated UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019) in the extreme south. Writing-on-Stone protects the largest concentration of First Nations rock art on the North American Great Plains, with about 50 ancestral Blackfoot rock art sites. The badlands support distinctive plant and animal communities including prickly pear cactus, golden eagle, prairie rattlesnake, kit fox, burrowing owl (an endangered species), pronghorn antelope, and bighorn sheep on the steeper canyon walls. The Bearspaw, Blood, Piikani, and Siksika First Nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy hold treaty rights and traditional territory across most of the badlands region.